Phil Rickman - The Secrets of Pain

‘I’m not sure what you’re saying, Jeremy.’

‘Couldn’t hack it. Dogs was all over the place some days. He’d give a command, dog’d go for it real slow. Or run off, back down to the river. Couldn’t count on ’em. He was gettin’ real depressed. Thought it was his age. Got so he didn’t wanner take the dogs out n’more.’

‘So you got all these valuable dogs for nothing from a man who’s known for being tight as a duck’s arse?’

‘Too many dogs is more of a burden than anything, Mr Bliss. We agreed mabbe he’d have ’em back one day. I told him I reckoned it wasn’t about him and it wasn’t about his dogs. They works fine yere. Poetry.’

‘I’m not getting this.’

‘You’re a copper, Mr Bliss. Nobody ’spects you to get it. Had to be a reason them top fields wasn’t used much – and that was how it was for years. Generations, mabbe. I had a walk over it when I went to fetch the dogs. Some places, the air feels loaded. A place looks quiet, but it en’t. A lot of ravens, too, for some reason.’

‘Ravens.’ Bliss thought about this, and it was Vasile Bocean all over again. ‘You know what, Jeremy?’ he said. ‘I’m tired.’

He sat at his desk for several minutes. All right, raised a Catholic and, whatever anybody said, you never lost that and all the baggage. And what Jeremy had been hinting at – feelings, atmosphere – he wouldn’t entirely rubbish any of it. Privately. In the midnight hour. It was just nothing to do with police work. It didn’t help.

He got up and stood by his window. The sky was like the inside of an orange peel. The light nights were coming. Didn’t like them any more, dark was best, watching the lights going out across the road, on the hill above Great Malvern.

Colleagues only. The way those words had been pinballing round his head all day. Telling himself she didn’t mean it, she’d come round. He’d find some way of bringing her round. Have to. Couldn’t lose this. Couldn’t let it just come apart like a cheap supermarket bag.

Somehow, he had to get Kirsty to refute any suggestion that he’d ever abused her physically. She could call him any kind of shit as long as she told the truth about that, sent it back up the line.

Bliss pulled out his iPhone, checked his incomings. No e-mails of any consequence, just the one phone message.

Annie Howe. Thank Christ. Bliss clicked on it. Annie’s voice was very low, but not so low the words weren’t metallically distinct.

‘ Didn’t think I could be surprised any more at the level of your blind stupidity.’

Bliss clapped the phone tight to his ear, both hands around it in case anybody came in.

‘ Don’t know how you could have thought for one minute that I wouldn’t find out. Your wife. Your own bloody wife.’

Deadness for several seconds.

‘ Anyway,’ Annie said, ‘ That’s it.’

End of message.

Bliss wrenched the phone away from his ear, stabbed at the screen to call her back. All right, no, he couldn’t explain why he hadn’t told her about Kirsty’s suspicions, except to say that he hadn’t believed the bitch, couldn’t imagine how she could possibly know about Annie. Still didn’t know.

Annie’s phone was switched off.

Bliss stared at the iPhone, all the little symbols, the ten thousand useless friggin’ apps. Rubbed the cold sweat from his forehead.

So who had the bitch told?

He strode out of the office, through the CID room without speaking to anybody, down the stairs and out of the building, his face and the back of his neck feeling like they were badly sunburned.

Lol watched Merrily collapse back into his sofa. Late sun honeying the room, red veins pulsing among the ashes at the bottom of the woodstove. As so often these days, Merrily looked vacant, wiped-out.

‘So where do I go from here?’

Lol was thinking maybe a new career. It was a crap job, the clergy, and no indication it would ever get better. So much open contempt now. The Church, God, the afterlife – all delusion. Thinking it and getting a buzz out of saying it, loudly, in public, on TV, and the only people who shouted back were the crazy fundamentalists like his late parents who’d cut him out of their lives.

Merrily had come home this afternoon to find the answering machine going, Uncle Ted, the churchwarden, trying to lean on her, before tonight’s parish meeting, about his plans to turn the church into a greasy spoon. It was about paying bills.

The bleeping of the answering machine had chased her out of the house and across the road in search of sanctuary. I think I need help , she’d said, and they’d talked for an hour, sharing an omelette and toast. She’d told him about last night’s visit from James Bull-Davies and everything she’d learned about a man called Byron Jones. From Barry, from Jones’s ex-wife and, finally, Syd’s wife, Fiona.

‘You believe this man raped her?’

‘You think it’s something she’d invent?’

‘But she didn’t go to the police. Or to anyone.’

‘Syd would’ve killed him.’

‘And now he’s dead, does Mrs Spicer want you to do something about this?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Lol sat down next to Merrily.

‘How would she feel about you simply dumping it all on Bull-Davies? Who asked you to share.’

‘She wouldn’t like that. I’m only telling you because I know it won’t go out of this house. I mean, who is William Lockley? Why does he want the information? Does he want to use it or suppress it? Who am I working for?’

‘So tell Bull-Davies what you’ve heard about Jones without naming names. And then back off.’

‘Can’t now. Not with Syd’s funeral.’

‘That,’ Lol said, ‘was a mistake.’

He slid off the sofa, gathered up two logs from the hearth, opened the stove and put them in. Watching the fire seizing one, thinking of the insatiable furnace in a crematorium, where quickie funerals were conducted by a duty vicar who’d never met the customer.

And this… this was the summation of a life, Merrily would protest. Where was the electricity, the surge of transition, the smoothing of the final earthly path by the subtle energy of sorrow? No wonder some of them didn’t rest. She didn’t do quickies. A properly conducted funeral needed the history. Bottom line: if she’d felt an obligation to Syd before, now it was cast in bronze.

‘What was I supposed to say? No, thanks, best to find somebody who doesn’t give a toss? Lol, it’s like he’s haunting me. The way he showed up at the chapel. I keep hearing that flat voice in my head when I’m not expecting it. “Samuel Dennis Spicer, Church of England”. Smell his cigarette smoke in church.’

‘Isn’t there a term for that?’

‘Psychological projection?’

‘Arising from guilt. Self-recrimination,’ Lol said. ‘Misplaced.’

‘No, this is something else.’ Merrily stood up, walked to the window, looked across the cobbles at the vicarage. ‘He was taking steps to protect himself against something he considered evil. He goes out on Credenhill with a Bergen full of Bible, as if he knows he isn’t coming back. And he leaves these books behind like clues to something. One pointing directly at a man who went from good friend to bitter enemy.’

‘Just do a meaningful funeral. Pray for both their souls or something.’

‘Sure.’ She smiled. ‘Walk away. Credenhill’s twenty minutes down the road.’

‘And always go the other way to Hereford.’

Lol had planned to tell her, finally, about Jane and Cornel and the cockfighting, but that would be too much for her to handle. Needed to deal with that himself. At least with Danny and Gomer on the case he felt better about it. Get the evidence, share it with Jane, then take it to the RSPCA and the police. Let Jane take the credit if it worked out; shield her from repercussions if it didn’t.